some fruit, with a side of self-reflection

its blackberry season!! was out at prall’s today, killing little baby buckthorn, and all of the blackberries since the last time i was there have turned from hard red nubs into luscious fruit. I collected a bunch in an empty container from my lunch and brought them back to the mainland for sharing with sb and her roomies. life is incredible, including humidity, canoe rides, deer flies, meetings, voles, and groundsel bushes.

i went to NC to visit mi familia from last friday through this past tuesday, and realized suddenly that my first day back at work after vacation is always a bad day.

not just because i’m back from vacation – i love my job, and get antsy when i spend too much time not working. i think about it, and am totally intellectually and emotionally involved by it, and enjoy it more consistently than almost anything.

i think its partly about management.

my employers and workmates have many things going for them – organization and consistency are not among them. the key to management is setting a framework of expectations, with some reference to measurable goals, establishing consequences for failure and success, and then being consistent about the application of both framework and consequences – obviously there’s a lot of other stuff involved too, but that’s the base. my managers do virtually none of that, and what they do is utterly inconsistent. it throws me out of whack generally, but i normally compensate by over planning my own stuff, and working on my crew to follow my expectations instead of looking to the group generally to set those.

which means i leave and things go a little haywire, since the systems not reinforced anywhere or checked up on by anyone else – so people show up late, do unrelated work, i get 40 emails asking me to check on things i’ve not been kept in the loop on, and assigned random extra tasks on days when i clearly have something else marked on the calendar. meetings occur wherein the topic/question which prompted the meeting is never discussed, even obliquely.

its also partly about me.

I am, in relation to work (and probly in other ways), not the most flexible of people. when there is a task at hand and work to be done, i tend to take the most direct approach to completing it. I am not good at following hierarchy; I am not good at waiting to be given a job; I am not good at keeping my mouth shut when someone else is being ineficient, or simply not proactive; I am not good at leaving a job partly done because quitting time arrives; I am not good at taking my full union-sanctioned hour lunch break when it takes an hour and twenty to get to the site and an hour and twenty to get back, or being gracious about other people doing so. I am not necessarily kind when people are not at least trying to do their jobs to the best of their capacity – I tend to be more acerbic and sarcastic than necessary when confronted with work-related bs.

these two things do not mesh well.

especially if I’ve had a few days off for the disorganization and misunderstanding and rescheduling to pile up, and to forget that things don’t EVER go according to plan.

and then I get grumpy, and sound bitter, and am one major Negative Nelly. and I tend to internalize it all, and get internally exaggerate-y, and mopey about how life is awful and people don’t like me and its all my fault nothing ever goes right, etc.

ALWAYs on the first day back.

methinks I need a new system for coping with my work situation – because if my current method does a tailspin everry time I take a day off, then I have two options: 1. don’t take any days off, 2. be a mopey jerk. neither of which i like.

suggestions?